Part 4: Asking About Improvements

“Where do you go with this story?” It’s a question we are often asked in our interview coaching. This post is the next in a series that will discuss common “story archetypes” that candidates share, and what kinds of information you are seeking with your follow-up questions in each.

Candidates love to tell stories about taking something bad or broken and making it better. This can involve customer relationships, internal business processes, products–basically anything that drives value in a business.

What follow-ups are most essential to ask when a candidate brings up an “improvement” story? While no story should be viewed in a cooke-cutter fashion, there are a few well-trodden paths you will almost always want to go with these stories.

As always, there is the what component and the how component, as well as the calibration. Let’s take each in turn.

What

When a candidate talks about improving something, we recommend establishing clarity around the starting point and the ending point. If it’s a VP Accounting who talks about improving month-end closing processes, you can ask what the closing timeframe was before and then after the improvement. If it’s a designer who talks about improving the look-and-feel of a product, again, ask about the before and the after with as much specificity as possible (or as necessary, given your goals in the interview). If it’s something subjective like a design improvement, ask them to talk about the most notable elements that changed, to make it tangible.

Calibration

After digging into the what, you will often want to shift directly to calibration, because you are already on the topic of the nature of the improvement. Here are three common directions this calibration conversation can go:

• Goals/Expectations. Let’s say the VP Finance improved month-end closing timeframes from 2 weeks to 3 days. A great follow-up here would be “what was [boss] hoping for?” or “what was the goal you were given?” Hopefully the candidate will simply share the goal: “The goal was to be under one week.” Sometimes there is no specific target given, or it’s unclear how impressive their performance was vs. that target. Then you can shift to…
• ...Third-party Perspective. “What did [boss/key stakeholder] say about getting it to 3 days?” If you want to add an additional layer of honesty, ask “What would [boss/key stakeholder] tell us about that result if we spoke with them?” This approach is also helpful with subjective improvements, like our designer’s. You can ask, “Who among your stakeholders had the best perspective on the quality of the look-and-feel of the product?” Once they tell you who that person is, just ask what they would likely say about the end result.
• Impact. Another direction you can take the calibration conversation is around business impact. Simply ask, “What was the impact of that improvement?” Or, for our VP Accounting candidate, “What was the impact of moving closing timeframes from 2 weeks to 3 days?”

How

The other critical dimension in any improvement story is HOW the candidate made it happen. This can be asked before the WHAT - CALIBRATION pairing, or after it. This is where things get interesting! Improvements can come from a wide variety of underlying mechanisms, and some will involve an entirely new sub-story.

For example, our VP Accounting candidate’s improvements to month-end close may have been the result of designing a creative or innovative new business process—in which case we are now presented with an Innovation story that we may choose to dive into further. Or it may not have involved any creative wizardry, but rather a bold call to finally consolidate two disconnected IT systems—in which case we are likely presented with a Decision story (the topic for a future post in this series). Or it may involve other story archetypes that we will be exploring further (e.g. Grinds). The key is this–once you know what story archetype the candidate is talking about, you can choose how deeply to dig into the content of that new archetype. If the how content is highly relevant to the Target in question, go deep. If it’s not, or if the how is pretty self-evident, move on to your next initial question.

Improvement stories are relatively easy to unpack, but the how component can lead you down new rabbit holes. The trick is to keep your Target firmly in mind as your gauge of how deep you really need to go with the candidate.